October 7, 2025 by Scholastic Press
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
Thirteen year old Evie is excited to be in Berlin, competing on the first women's gymnastic team in the 1936 Olympics. She's having a tough time, since she beat out another East Coast gymnast and the other competitors aren't being very supportive, but Evie's used to hard times. Her family lived in Oklahoma, and lost their farm after the horrendous Dust Bowl storms, and have been living in their car in California after a family tragedy. She hopes to win a medal in order to help out her family. She has made a friend in Mary, her roommate and equestrian, who is also a movie star. When Evie gets a note to meet someone on a local bridge, she is shocked that Karl, a German weight lifter, and Solomon, a reporter, ask her to help rob the German Reichsbank of gold. They need her gymnastics skills to break into the vault of the new building that is under construction; since Karl is a builder there, he has inside information, and the hullabaloo around the Olympics will take scrutiny off the site. Karl wants to use the money to help the resistance, since his boyfriend was put into a concentration camp. This doesn't sound like a great idea until Evie doesn't do well in the competition after coming very close to making the cut off. She also finds out secrets about her German guide, a boy her age names Heinz who is literally the poster boy for the Hitler Youth, and this motivates her to help. Along with a French Senegalese athlete who is not happy about being categorized as a "mischling", the would be robbers scout out the site, and work on getting vital information and supplies. Evie manages to get the code to the vault by going to a party with Mary and talking to the banker's young son to get his birthday. Mary is hit on by a Nazi, and this, along with other information she finds out, puts her in the right frame of mind to eventually help Evie out. Just as the heist is about to happen, another US gymnast is hurt, and Evie must compete at the same time the heist is supposed to roll out. Solomon threatens her, and says she must throw the competition. When she doesn't, it's up to her to figure out a new plan, or Solomon will endanger Heinz, to whom Evie has become close. Evie comes up with a plan to carry out the theft while the Nazis are having their nightly rally in the Olympic stadium, and even brings in Mary to impersonate the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in order to help get the group where they need to be without attracting attention. When things go wrong with the heist, it looks like all of the work might be in vain. Evie has had some more clever thoughts, but also gives the money to Heinz. As she says, while people in her country don't seem to care whether she lives or dies, at least no one is actively trying to kill her.
Strengths: It's a bit surprising that there haven't already been middle grade books about the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, so it's good to have one on this topic. Including sports of any kind is always a great way to attract readers, and there are very few books involving gymnasts! Evie's background, having barely survived the Dust Bowl, was interesting, and Heinz, as her Hitler Youth overseer, has a lot of surprises. Gratz worked hard to include mentions of many people from backgrounds targeted by the Nazis; there are characters that are LGBTQIA+, Black, and Jewish, and there is good information about how the Nazis treated them. I was unaware that Germany specifically brought in Jewish athletes who didn't "look Jewish" to deflect attention from their discrimination, or that some Jewish shops were allowed to be open. The fact that Berlin put on a good face for the event, and his crumbling facades behind Nazi flags was also interesting. The book ends with several pages of notes about what portions of the book were real, and which were fiction.
Weaknesses: This was a longer book, coming in at over 350 pages. The bank heist took up so much of the story, and seemed like an odd inclusion. I'll all for action and suspense, but it came across as a bit goofy. Having Mary impersonate Riefenstahl was the only good part of that plot arc. There would have been plenty going on in the book with Evie's Depression Era background, and Heinz' family situation, and there were some things about the Olympics and Germany in 1936 that could have been explored more.
What I really think: I do have a lot of Gratz fans, so I'll probably purchase this, but there's a lot I would have changed about the story, like including more information about the women's gymnastics team in the Olympics. Add this to the still steady stream of World War II books that are still being published, like Hopkinson's They Battled in Blizzards, Nayeri's The Teacher of Nomad Land, and the much more intriguing Rise of the Spider series by Michael Spradlin.
Weaknesses: This was a longer book, coming in at over 350 pages. The bank heist took up so much of the story, and seemed like an odd inclusion. I'll all for action and suspense, but it came across as a bit goofy. Having Mary impersonate Riefenstahl was the only good part of that plot arc. There would have been plenty going on in the book with Evie's Depression Era background, and Heinz' family situation, and there were some things about the Olympics and Germany in 1936 that could have been explored more.
What I really think: I do have a lot of Gratz fans, so I'll probably purchase this, but there's a lot I would have changed about the story, like including more information about the women's gymnastics team in the Olympics. Add this to the still steady stream of World War II books that are still being published, like Hopkinson's They Battled in Blizzards, Nayeri's The Teacher of Nomad Land, and the much more intriguing Rise of the Spider series by Michael Spradlin.
October 7, 2025 by Graphix
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
It's fascinating to see what publishers decide to reinterpret as graphic novels. Tarshis' I Survived books and Alexander's Crossover are roughly the same length in both versions, so it seemed a bit of an odd choice to just add pictures, but Gibbs' Spy School adaptations have such tiny print and so many words that it's hard to imagine students enjoying them. Then there are older novels (Pullman's 1995 The Golden Compass or Pearce's 1958 Tom's Midnight Garden) that get the treatment; my students tend to not pick those up. Publishing is about making money, so someone must have thought turning Gratz' popular 2017 Refugee into a graphic novel would earn some bucks.
This is a fine treatment; the illustrations are attractive, and the story stays true to the original. Since the graphic version is shorter than the prose version, it seemed like the perspective changed every three pages, which gave me a bit of whiplash and made it hard to focus on the stories. I found myself wanting each of the three storylines to have a slightly different color palette to differentiate them, but this didn't happen. There are other original graphic novels about the plight of immigrants, like Colfer's 2018 Illegal, Brown's 2019 The Unwanteds, and Jamieson and Mohamed's 2020 When the Stars are Scattered that told their stories with a more effective use of pictures. Since I have five copies of the original Refugee (people kept donating copies, and they were popular for a while) I probably won't buy the graphic novel version.
From the review of the 2017 prose novel:
Gratz tackles the idea of countries in turmoil by focusing on three children from three different time periods. Josef is a German Jew whose family is able to evade the Nazis after his father is arrested, and eventually book passage on a fairly nice ship bound for Cuba. They eventually run into complications, and the captain attempts to land them in the US and then the UK. Isabel lives in Cuba in 1994, and her family is struggling with the lack of food and the unrest in the country until the father feels that he will be arrested unless they leave. With the help of another family who has built a boat, they start on a perilous voyage to the US which is complicated by Isabel's mother's pregnancy. In 2015, Mahmoud's family can no longer stay in Aleppo, Syria after their apartment building is destroyed. They take off in their car, with a fair amount of resources, but it's a long journey to Austria, and nothing about the trip is easy. In all three cases, loved ones are lost, but eventually parts of the family arrive in safer places. There are some nice tie-ins at the end of the book, as well as additional information about the history of the conflicts that propel these families away from their homelands.
Strengths: This was rather grim, but certainly a book that students today need in order to understand what is going on in the world. Gratz always does excellent research, and he doesn't over dramatize events. I found it particularly illuminating that Mahmoud's family was so well-to-do and had made fairly good plans to get out of the country; I guess I have a typical tendency to think of refugees of people who are forced to leave very quickly with no resources at all, which must sometimes be the case. Their use of smart phones to map their routes was especially interesting, and the father's sense of humor added a very human element to the story. The three narratives change back and forth but are easy to follow.
Weaknesses: Again, a bit grim. Younger readers need to know that there are some deaths, a baby who is given away in order to be saved from drowning, and a lot of violence.
What I really think: This would make a great class read, since some of the historical topics as well as the issue of forced migration might need some explanation for students to fully understand them.
Gratz tackles the idea of countries in turmoil by focusing on three children from three different time periods. Josef is a German Jew whose family is able to evade the Nazis after his father is arrested, and eventually book passage on a fairly nice ship bound for Cuba. They eventually run into complications, and the captain attempts to land them in the US and then the UK. Isabel lives in Cuba in 1994, and her family is struggling with the lack of food and the unrest in the country until the father feels that he will be arrested unless they leave. With the help of another family who has built a boat, they start on a perilous voyage to the US which is complicated by Isabel's mother's pregnancy. In 2015, Mahmoud's family can no longer stay in Aleppo, Syria after their apartment building is destroyed. They take off in their car, with a fair amount of resources, but it's a long journey to Austria, and nothing about the trip is easy. In all three cases, loved ones are lost, but eventually parts of the family arrive in safer places. There are some nice tie-ins at the end of the book, as well as additional information about the history of the conflicts that propel these families away from their homelands.
Strengths: This was rather grim, but certainly a book that students today need in order to understand what is going on in the world. Gratz always does excellent research, and he doesn't over dramatize events. I found it particularly illuminating that Mahmoud's family was so well-to-do and had made fairly good plans to get out of the country; I guess I have a typical tendency to think of refugees of people who are forced to leave very quickly with no resources at all, which must sometimes be the case. Their use of smart phones to map their routes was especially interesting, and the father's sense of humor added a very human element to the story. The three narratives change back and forth but are easy to follow.
Weaknesses: Again, a bit grim. Younger readers need to know that there are some deaths, a baby who is given away in order to be saved from drowning, and a lot of violence.
What I really think: This would make a great class read, since some of the historical topics as well as the issue of forced migration might need some explanation for students to fully understand them.
I've been seeing quite a bit WWII literature popping up, which isn't a bad thing. I just wonder why....
ReplyDeleteI think it is because WWII had very clear enemies, so it felt like a righteous fight. Very few books on Vietnam or Korea for this reason. It was such an all encompassing event, and so many weird and interesting things happened. I still have lots of readers interested in it. Go figure.
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